Eyes on the Prize

This article emphasizes on the role and the importance of engineering competitive events for engineering students. More and more universities are encouraging competitions and integrating them with course curricula. This is because hands-on, competitive engineering lets students do what they came to school to do: innovate and build. In surveys and on internet chatrooms, students complain about the drudgery of learning engineering fundamentals. They learn the same concepts in a competition, but applying them to real challenges makes all the difference. Through competitions, students are fusing together disciplines to navigate a faster and more interconnected future. They are learning to rise to technical challenges, and discovering how to turn people with different skills into an effective team. They have helped commercialize manned spaceflight, launch the autonomous car revolution, design fuel-miser sports cars, and plumb the ocean depths. They are developing new combinations of skills, and laying the foundations for modern technologies and start-ups.